Oxford and Bridgwater

Abstract

The Oxford and Bridgwater by-elections pose problems of interpretation in many ways similar to those at East Fulham five years earlier. The British electorate is notoriously uninterested in, and uninformed about, foreign policy issues; yet here are three by-elections which, in the eyes of the candidates and of most commentators, were won and lost on foreign policy. The results were almost universally regarded as the voters’ verdicts on the foreign policy issues of the day. Baldwin thought that East Fulham had been fought and lost ‘on no issue but the pacifist’, and that the voters’ verdict made it impossible to present the country with a rearmament programme. In October and November 1938 Oxford and Bridgwater were taken to be the voters’ commentary on Munich, though there was some dispute as to what the voters were saying.

For Bridgwater

For public opinion generally

Old newspapers, both national and local, are necessarily a staple for any article such as this. To save footnotes, quotations from the Oxford Mail and the Bridgwater Mercury have not been individually identified.Google Scholar

Useful source material can also be found in the Local History Collection, Oxford Central Public Library, and in the Mass-Observation Archives inGoogle Scholar

Sussex University Library. I am most grateful to Tom Harrisson, Director of the Mass-Observation Archives, for giving me permission to see them and to quote from them. I am also very grateful to Alan Knight for lending me his unpublished essay on the Oxford by-election, and to those participants who answered my inquiries.Google Scholar